There's a nice philosophy podcast with a big back catalog called Partially Examined Life. This is the episode on Simone Weil, a philosopher I had never heard of prior. I found it pretty fascinating, especially for programmers:
It was surprisingly relevant to a conversation I had with a friend about the "psychology of work". (At one point, the group in the podcast concretely discusses the idea of a business manager who is formerly an individually contributor, who mechanizes his business, moves up and up in the "abstraction" of all aspects of the business operations, and then rather than being 'totally fulfilled' in the end, finds himself with a whole lot less creative work to do. This is eerily personal for me!)
I also think it's a nice conversation because it explains, without explicitly referencing it, why programming is such a satisfying creative activity, even if automation of labor is ultimately dehumanizing to laborers unless the automation is "total" or "complete", as discussed more in the podcast and by Weil in one of her essays ("Theoretical Picture of a Free Society").
Finally, it relates the idea of flow & creativity to the concept of individual & human liberty, a connection that had never really occurred to me before.
Nice observation on this "hyper-optiming" the human element away! You might like this quote, in a similar vein:
“There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both. Survival depends on establishing procedures which permit ordinary people to recognize these ranges and to opt for survival in freedom, to evaluate the structure built into tools and institutions so they can exclude those which by their structure are destructive, and control those which are useful.”
Weil's work on attention made me look at religion with entirely new eyes. Now I think I have truly only began the work I need to do to maintain clarity of thought while practicing attention.
For all those like me that don't have the necessary expertise to assimilate the original philosophical texts, I would recommend the excellent work done by Stephen West in his podcast Philosophize This. You might need to consume the work from David Hume onwards up until Simone Weil to get a good understanding, if like me you had no previous formal instruction in philosophy, but it's totally worth the effort.
I think an interested reader can get a lot of Gravity & Grace (which I recently completed) without much background in philosophy so long as one accepts that they won't understand _everything_ she writes. Given the mystical nature of some of her work, complete understanding is likely impossible anyway, but that doesn't take away from the rewards of studying the work. That being said, the Iliad and Bhagavad Gita seem as important to her work as more recent philosophers like Hume.
Another article mentioned that she came across the poem Love (III) by George Herbert. Very beautiful poem and I can see why her approach would reinspire people to reconsider God.
Philosophize This! podcast did a 4 parter on Simone Weil earlier this year. Stephen West does easily accessible introductions to philosophy. He started 10 years ago with the pre-socratics. Quite a ride.
I read Gravity and Grace, and I must say I found her philosophy of "embracing the environment to the point of disappearing" to be going too far, to the point of willing her own death.
Here is the excerpt that made me feel most awkward, translated with Google:
"That I disappear so that these things that I see become, because they will no longer be things that I see, perfectly beautiful. I in no way desire that this created world should no longer be sensitive to me, but that it should be sensitive to something else than me. To me he cannot tell his secret which is too high. Let me go, and the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets. Seeing a landscape as it is when I'm not there...
When I am somewhere, I defile the silence of heaven and earth with my breathing and the beating of my heart."
This seems like a very Jansenist view of the world, and it seems very dark to me.
Anyone would interpret this excerpt differently, and help me understand it better?
Coming from a meditative practice, I would interpret it in line with her "attention is the purest form of prayer."
You can be so immersed in experiencing the world that you forget everything except the experience itself. And there is great beauty and love and freedom in that.
The flip side of viewing the self as "nonexistent" is to see the world as an extension of self: no-self and Big Self are the same phenomenological experience, in a way. Deep sense of connection.
I have not read Gravity and Grace, should start it by tomorrow! But that is the perspective that is drawing me to her work.
> Yet for her, the primary duty of the philosophical person, and particularly a politically active one, remained rigorous self-examination – guided by the conviction that true moral enlightenment was only to be found beyond the spheres of man-made languages.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. The reference to Camus here is interesting to me since it is in the context of Absurdity that I consider this. A paradoxical desire to think the unthinkable, or to know the unknowable.
> Weil was convinced that in the depths of our existence, it is not concepts and arguments that define us as moral beings, but concrete experiences. ... More significantly, for Weil, we are beings moved to action not, in the first instance, by concepts but by forces beyond ourselves: experiences of suffering, love, profound insight or disturbance, whose origins Weil did not shy away from calling transcendent, even divine.
There is something of phenomenology to this idea.
> The true achievement of emancipation, Weil thought, lay in liberation not of the self but from the self. Reflective self-empowerment should make way for a pre-reflective alertness to the beauty and vulnerability of life. This leads to an active care for the world we share with other beings – it made no difference to her whether it was named “nature” or “God”.
This is very powerful thought and very reflective of many spiritual traditions.
> In Weil’s view, we need transformative experiences that arise when we become attentive to the natural beauty and interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such revelatory forms of attention “praying”:
“At its highest stage attention is the same as prayer. It assumes faith and love. It is associated with a freedom other than that of choice, which occurs at the level of the will – grace. Being so attentive that one no longer has a choice.”
This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception of mindfulness. And I mean "prayer" divorced from any religious context.
Although it isn't immediately related - I think this might be the most powerful use of AI. Instead of attempting to create the most intelligent and infallible oracle, we might instead create the most perfect mirror to reflect ourselves. And in that way we may see the "I" at the center of self dissolve.
> This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception of mindfulness. And I mean "prayer" divorced from any religious context.
I have had a similar journey in the last years, drawing more and more inspiration from Christian, jewish and muslim contemplatives, after years of mostly following a "secular Buddhist" path (basically buddhism without believing in rebirth. Which becomes quite thin, as buddhism is the path towards the end of rebirth...). I am not sure of what you mean by "religion", but what I am convinced about is that we need to allow for more "religiosity" than what the typical mindfulness/secular Buddhist movement allows. What often happens (or happened, as I do not pretend to be an innovator there) in those circles is that the rejection of religiosity means that a lot of assumptions underlying our culture (mostly the materialist ontology) goes unquestioned. There is actually lots of values in opening to religious interpretations of mystical experiences, and opening the range of possible interpretation. Without falling into a new fixed ontology, therr is something freeing in allowing oneself to think in terms of "the divine", "the ground of soul" or "the eternal present".
I see it as a potential for a new movement in mysticism. I feel you would get a lot out of reading some Weil - I spent a few hours yesterday just reading some of her essays. It gets heavy on the Christianity in some of her later writings which isn't to my own personal taste, but if you read it as a general mysticism it works just as well.
You make a good point on the question of what I mean by religion. I would say, I want to avoid the dogmatism associated with mainstream institutionalized religions. Something like what I assume you mean by "fixed ontology". Weil, on the other hand, argues that we should embrace it and argues that there is value/beauty in the ceremony, rituals and rites offered by churches.
She really occupies an interesting space. Her contemporaries were the likes of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I think that secular humanist crowd was totally unwilling to entertain mysticism. Also, Marx was ardently against religion seeing it as a tool of oppression. So Weil was unique in that she was aligned with them on political and economic issues, she was a grass-roots labour activist to the core, but she was also deeply spiritual and mystically inclined. Her criticisms of Marxism are heavily inspired by her belief in a transcendent divine that is completely absent from normal leftist/materialist view points.
It is sad that she died so young, at 34, before she could more deeply explore this political philosophy. It is interesting to consider what kind of political ideology you might get if you take the core understandings of Marx and even the post-modernists but you re-inject a non-dogmatic mysticism.
> In Weil’s view, we need transformative experiences that arise when we become attentive to the natural beauty and interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such revelatory forms of attention “praying”
I don't think it's an accident that many people consider God to be in their gardens.
One way to attempt this is to use AI as a sounding board for your own ideas. For example, I'm reading a few sources of Weil's thought now (she was surprisingly Christian and Catholic later in her life although a sense of general mysticism remained). As I read a bit more on the topic, I go to Chat-GPT and I explain it to the AI. I am not asking ChatGPT to give me information, I am asking it to be critical of my own understanding. Can it point out assumptions? Can it recognize areas I am weak in knowledge? Can it tell me of logical inconsistencies? I mean, in my own understanding - not particularly in the ideas of Weil. I am asking the AI to keep me accountable and to force me to demonstrate that I am critically thinking.
I've also been doing something similar with dream interpretation. I personally do not believe in divination or clairvoyance or really anything woo-woo. I'm even pretty skeptical of Jungian ideas of collective subconscious. But I do sometimes want to introspect on my dreams and AI is a fantastic non-judgmental listener. You can have the AI repeat it's understanding back to you and suggest interpretations. This can help you better understand your own interpretations and provide insight into your own personality.
If you find any value at all in keeping a journal for your thoughts, think of it like a super-charged journal. You aren't just working out your thoughts in a linear narrative or essay form, there is an aspect to collaborative exploration of your ideas. In this way, AI is helping you clarify your thoughts more than it is acting like a source for infallible information.
It seems "divination" is often misunderstood. Large element of it is very rational.
Our minds work in a way that we learn and then repeat patterns in our life. For instance, somebody will end up bad in relationships that are bad in a strikingly similar way.
These patterns must be unconsciously known to the person repeating them -- otherwise they would be unable to repeat them. So, in a way, unless you change something, you will repeat these patterns. So it is trivially so that unless something changes, your future is known. People are not conscious of the patterns, however. If they become conscious of the pattern, it loses its grip.
Much of "divination", such as Tarot cards, is getting a different perspective of your challenges, and becoming more conscious of the patterns you repeat. So, if "divination" works, then actually instead of divining the future, you will become free of the future that would have happened.
We are getting a bit off topic, which is fine for me, but I totally agree with you. I relate this to the ideas of Edward de Bono [1]. He had a set of practices to encourage creativity called "lateral thinking" which I apply to Tarot cards and other devices.
One example practice he suggested was to pick a topic you are interested in having creative ideas about, then choose a random word from a dictionary. He argued that the process of trying to connect the word in the dictionary to your topic would force you to connect ideas that were not normally connected in your everyday thinking.
In some way, Tarot cards are very similar to this practice. They provide a source for the random starting point that a person can use to connect ideas. Tarot cards are full of ambiguous symbolism which makes them an even more fecund source of creativity compared to random dictionary words.
However, I ardently oppose any notion that the selection of the random cards in themself reflect any intervention from a divine or some spirit world. It is very easy and surprisingly tempting to start seeing significance in the particular cards selected at random.
A little off topic, but after we talked about Simone Weil here on HN a couple of years ago I bought a book about her. HN sends me off in interesting directions!
I think I first came across Simone Weil via the subscribing to podcasts on a nokia symbian phone wayback when.
Searching now I found this BBC radio show that fits the timeline. Its a good introduction.
Simone Weil - In Our Time BBC Radio 4 - YouTube
SIMONE WEIL (1909-1943) Great Lives, Series 22, Episode 5 of 9 With: Matthew Parris, Eleanor Bron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS961W-Y8Uk
Meta comment, but man the patterns are so annoying now .. I open the link, see a giant cookie preference dialog opening up on top of the content, have to click into it to customize cookies, figure out how this particular site decided to implement the options, ensure everything except necessary cookies is disabled, and OK the dialog away. Now I'm actually let into the article - I read the first sentence, then scroll down to read more and find out I only get three lines of the article, and have to either register or pay to get more. No, no I don't think I will, and I'll never be back.
That's nothing, most sites nowadays have all the above plus some advertisement banner plus some video on autoplay and when you get past all that, in the remaining 5% of your screen that is still dedicated for its intended purpose, you realize that the content is 80% SEO and 20% advertisement. Yesterday I was searching for a recipe and instead I contracted digital herpes.
And on top of all that, most web sites -still- have no clue how to properly display on a mobile device. I'm not sure they even want to. The web was better on the first iphone, before web sites learned how to detect someone was on a smartphone.
Curious... the article starts out by saying: "And the task of disseminating her canon and her influence is still, almost unbelievably, only just beginning" and then never mentiones the question of the copyright on her works. Simone Weil died 80 years ago, so her work should be out of copyright by now, but I can't find any of it on-line.
This seems to be the French text of “Gravity and Grace”. The English translation dates from 1997; her other works are even less known and less likely to have sufficiently old translations.
Copyright really does screw over lesser-known philosophers.
Interesting yellow note on the right side about the fact that her work is public domain in Canada (50 years after her death) but it might not be the case in other places (70 years) and that if you download it illegally, it's your responsibility.
Yes, everyone in France has heard of Simone Veil (the politician and social activist) and probably a tiny fraction about Simone Weil.
Simone Veil was one of, if not the, greatest statesman who fought for women's freedom of choice. Her life was recently shown in a biopic in cinemas (the movie is tough, though - as was her life). What a figure!
